I used that code to take lines from a file and put them in a table. Since the lines had links in them they had http://www.site.com/so/on/and/on , I hate haveing to escape dosens of slashes so I used the !!! so that I wouldn't have to yet it preformed the same function. I learned to use ! from cure.

And thanks for the tip, just saves me from making future posts about .*

i use this piece of code to pull multiple items from a line of html and then load up the variables: <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Arial,Helvetica,sans serif">code:</font><HR>

foreach $line (@lines) { if ($line =~ /<!--top: (.*)--><li><a href="\1\.$ext">(.*)<\/a> - <b>(.*)<\/b>\s+<i>(.*)<\/i>/) { push(@ENTRIES,$1); $TITLE{$1} = $2; $LOCATION{$1} = $3; $DATE{$1} = $4; } } </pre><HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Then I spew it all back out after sorting it and adding some extra html to support it. It seems to work quite well.